Summary

  • APNIC's 22 October ASPA guidance says a transit provider belongs in the customer's signed provider list even when it carries traffic only as backup, in some places or for some routes.
  • MyAPNIC offers BGP-based suggestions and checks proposed changes against observed routes. The operator still has to account for the standby arrangement waiting offstage.

The backup circuit has an enviable job: collect its fee, stay quiet and hope nobody needs it. In APNIC's new ASPA guidance, quiet is no excuse for leaving its provider ASN out of the signed list. APNIC expressly includes partial transit, transit available at selected locations and backup transit in the provider relationship. The customer AS holder has to describe the authority it has arranged, including the part that normally sits in the wings.

An Autonomous System Provider Authorization, or ASPA, is signed by the customer ASN holder to name ASNs authorized to carry its traffic onward. The IETF's ASPA profile draft calls for one customer object listing all its providers. The control point is the complete authorized set. If the main upstream fails and the backup starts carrying routes, that formerly sleepy relationship is suddenly part of the path other networks assess.

APNIC says MyAPNIC can suggest providers from BGP observations and check a proposed ASPA against existing observed routes before the holder commits it. That makes the visible network a useful rehearsal. The backup contract and the failover runbook supply the rest of the cast: an idle path may offer the observation system little to see. A sensible change review therefore puts the network diagram, transit agreements and planned failover next to the interface's suggestions.

This is a surprisingly human problem for a cryptographic object. Someone has to remember the understudy before opening night. APNIC warns that a badly configured ASPA can invalidate routes involving the customer ASN as path validation spreads. Operators can settle the provider list while the network is calm, then keep it in step with each transit change. The important moment to discover a missing backup is the desk review, with coffee still hot.